The poor people's habitations he finds in Brittany to be 'miserable heaps of dirt.' There, as so often elsewhere in France, no glass window, scarcely any light; the women furrowed without age by labour. 'One-third of what I have seen of this province seems uncultivated, and nearly all of it in misery.' 'Nothing but privileges and poverty.' And every one remembers what these privileges were — ' these tortures of the peasantry ' he calls them — of which in one sentence he enumerates twenty-eight.
And now, in 1889, turn to these same provinces, to the third generation in descent from these very peasants. 'The desert that saddened Arthur Young's eyes,' writes Miss Betham-Edwards to-day, 'may now be described as a land of Goshen, overflowing with milk and honey.' 'The land was well stocked and cultivated, the people were neatly and appropriately dressed, and the signs of general contentment and well-being delightful to contemplate.' In one province, a million acres of waste land have been brought into cultivation. In five or six years, wrote the historian Mignet, ' the Revolution quadrupled the resources of civilisation private tours istanbul.'
Where Arthur Young saw the miserable peasant woman, Miss Betham-Edwards tells us that today the farmers' daughters have for portions 'several thousand pounds.' What Arthur Young calls an 'unimproved, poor, and ugly country,' Miss Betham-Edwards now finds to be 'one vast garden.' In the landes, where the traveller saw nearly a hundred miles of continuous waste, 700,000 acres have been fertilised by canals, and a very small portion remains in the state in which he found it. 'Maine and Anjou have the appearance of deserts,' writes the traveller of 1789. ' Sunny, light-hearted, danceloving Anjou ' appears to the traveller of 1889 a model of prosperity and happiness. Where he found the peasants living in caves underground, she finds neat homesteads costing more than 6000 francs to build. In Dauphine, where he finds, in 1789, mountains waste or in a great measure useless, she finds, in 1889, choice vineyards that sell at 25,000 francs per acre.
A hundred years
And what has done all this? The prophetic soul of Arthur Young can tell us, though a hundred years were needed to make his hopes a reality. His words have passed into a household phrase where the English tongue reaches: 'The magic of property turns sand to gold.' 'The inhabitants of this village deserve encouragement for their industry,' he writes of Sauve, 'and if I was a French minister they should have it. They would soon turn all the deserts around them into gardens.'
' Give a man,' he adds, in a phrase which is now a proverb, 'the secure possession of a bleak rock, and he will turn it into a garden; give him a nine years' lease of a garden, and he will convert it into a desert.' What has made all this misery? he cries again and again; what has blighted this magnificent country, and crushed this noble people? Misgovernment, bad laws, cruel customs, wanton selfishness of the rich, the powerful, and the privileged. Nothing was ever said more true. Arthur Young's good legislator came even sooner than he dared to hope, armed with a force more tremendous than he could conceive. It was a minister greater than any Turgot, or Necker, or Mirabeau; who served a sovereign more powerful than Louis or Napoleon. His sovereign was the Revolution; the minister was the new system. And the warm-hearted English gentleman lived to see his 'great lords skip again' somewhat too painfully. The storm has passed, the blood is washed out; but the ' red fool-fury, of the Seine ' has made rural France the paradise of the peasant.
Let us take a typical bit of the country here and there and compare its state in 1789 and in 1889. From Paris and Orleans Arthur Young, in 1787, journeyed southward through Berri and the Limousin to Toulouse. His diary is one cry of pity. ' The fields are scenes of pitiable management, as the houses are of misery.' 'Heaven grant me patience while I see a country thus neglected, and forgive me the oaths I swear at the absence and ignorance of the possessors.' 'The husbandry poor and the people miserable.' 'The poor people who cultivate the soil here are mttayers, that is, men who hire the soil without ability to stock it—a miserable system that perpetuates poverty and excludes instruction.'
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